


the nurse from morley

by Serindrana



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-01
Updated: 2013-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-04 00:43:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/704508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana





	the nurse from morley

**Author's Note:**

  * For [patho (ghostsoldier)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostsoldier/gifts).



 

The first woman he ever loves is a nurse from Morley.

She has curling copper hair and freckles down to her belly, but her voice is shot from years of inhaling cotton and wool dust in the cloth factories up north. Her lungs are shot, too. It’s what will kill her, he thinks at the time, in a year or five or ten. He doesn’t know if he’ll live long enough to see that day.

They meet when his boys finally persuade him to see a doctor about his smashed up jaw. A week has already passed since Mike the Fish broke it, six days since he drove a nail through the blighter’s forehead. Apparently, that means she has to break it so it can heal alright.

He lets her.

Anybody else, some old moneyed doctor up on Clavering or some back alley hack, he would’ve had taken out back for even suggesting it, but her, with her lovely neck and calves and everything else he already knows he wants to see, with her crackling voice and crackling breath, with how she smells like dried flowers, beneath all the antiseptic- her, he allows. She breaks his jaw all over again and he howls because he can’t grit his teeth and because he used up his stoic silence a week ago.

Then she bandages him up, gives him some herbal stuff to take and a straw to drink it through, and sends him on his way. He can’t talk to ask for her address or her name, but she gives him both.

_Rhonwen_. Morley through and through, as far as he can tell. He likes it, and practices writing it out as best he can, but he spells it wrong and she laughs the first time he writes out his thoughts for her, him taking up her whole little table and her perched on a stool nearby.

_ronwen_ , he writes,  _i want to kiss you_

His letters are crooked and unpracticed, but she leans in all the same and kisses his swollen jaw, his chapped lips, his nose.

“No more than that,” she says, “or you’ll never heal.”

Eventually, though, he can talk again, and do all other sorts of things with his mouth that delight her and make her squeal, and he thinks he’s found magic, and it’s none of that Outsider shit at all. He’s got a gang and he’s got territory and he’s got a woman. He’s got everything a man needs in life.

And then somebody fires a shot at her.

They’re at the same too-small table in her second-floor apartment, and she’s saying he looks like he has some Morley blood in him, too, and that his name  _(the name he never tells anybody_ ) sounds a bit Morley, and does he know where his da’s from? when a bottle hits the outside wall and explodes, flames licking at the window.

The gunshot comes a second later.

He pushes her down and tells her to stay put, and he goes to put the fires out and knock some skulls, but when he comes back for her, she’s not there. He finds her in her bedroom, huddled up and crying, and she says something like  _I never really thought about what it meant, your boys and you_ , and then she tells him to leave.

He argues with her all night. He’s shaking from adrenaline and anger and fear, and all he can see when he looks at her is her eyes going distant. She doesn’t want him anymore. He’s the same man he’s always been, he’s never hidden anything, but she never pressed and now- and now he’s losing her.

When he tries to kiss her, she turns her face away and cries into her shoulder.

He leaves. He puts a note on her table, the way they used to talk when he couldn’t speak (and now, when she’s not listening), that says,  _rhonwen, i love you, please don’t be scared_.

A week later, her apartment is empty.

___________________

He never sees her again. He keeps her apartment empty, scaring anybody who tries to squat in it off, never letting it get rented out, in the desperate hope that maybe she’ll come back. He builds an empire on bootleg whiskey. He watches as an empress dies and the city falls into shit. And then he carves out a little bastion against the plague, always keeping an eye out for her.

Five days after he learns his still’s been contaminated and he’s spreading the plague instead of fighting it off, his boys bring news that they’ve seen her, and that the apartment’s occupied again. It’s been upwards of twenty years since the last time he saw her, and he feels suddenly just the same as he did back then, a scared and confused kid, not even really a man, not for all his bulk and his anger and his reputation. It’s not safe here, not anymore.

He goes to warn her, in person, even though Crowley is still missing and somebody’s out to get him.

The door is open when he gets there. There’s the same small set of rooms, the same small table, and sitting there, perched on a stool, is Rhonwen. Her hair’s getting streaked with grey, maybe from the stress or maybe just because. Her skin’s not as soft or pale as it used to be, and her eyes-

Her eyes are bloodshot, a weeper’s eyes before the weeping starts. She coughs, and her chest rattles in a way it never rattled before.

_But that rattle’s going to off her_ , he thinks, standing helpless in the doorway.

There’s a tube of elixir on the table, but it’s too late for that to help, even if it’s the real stuff. The tube in his pocket’s all for shit, too. And what’s he supposed to do, kiss her and make it better? This isn’t a broken jaw.

The old break throbs, and he swallows down his fear and pride and shame, and walks into the room. There’s paper on the table, and a pen, like she’s been writing memoirs. He comes up to the table, and she turns to watch him, silently, already a ghost.

He writes,

_Welcome home, love._   _Slackjaw will keep you safe._

She reaches over and takes the pen, and writes,

_You’re lying._

He takes it back.

_Can’t cure the plague, no. But I’ll keep you safe. Safe and comfortable._

He hesitates, looks at her.

She smiles, and a single red bead rolls down her cheek.

His heart clenches, but he does the right and proper thing. He reaches for his knife.


End file.
